The Technology Box Office!!

Monthly Archives: October 2011

DiRT 3, Powered by the EGO Game Engine developed by Codemasters, UK, is a rallying video game and the third release of DiRT series, one of the most advanced racing game (DiRT 2 was the first DirectX 11 Game supporting Tessellation and stunning graphics performance) where you can race through the snow, rain and dirt and experience dramatic night races with the largest amount of rally content in the Dirt series yet.

Features stunning new Gymkhana mode, inspired by Ken Block’s incredible freestyle driving event, and enables you to upload your best runs direct to YouTube! Other game mode capability includes split-screen and competitive online multiplayer.

DiRT series is also known for its soundtracks and DiRT 3 does include some great soundtracks that are available on Youtube, metacafe, etc. If you have purchased or downloaded this game, you might want to look in to the game folder (Or you have already gone through but had no luck!!) that already include these tracks, atleast I would! 🙂 This article is about how you can listen to the tracks and get the Artist and Track name before even going to Youtube and other sites. Yes, ofcourse you can find these listings in various gaming sites too. But what if you are interested in a particular track that you heard while zooming through this rally race game!

DiRT 3 tracks are stored on your disk at the installation location. Go to the root and you’ll find a folder named ‘audio‘. Bingo!!. Now you have the location, and you start looking for the audio files…BUMP!! You have no idea where to go next. FYI DiRT 3 folder is organised into categories. The folder which we are interested in is the ‘dictionaries‘.

DiRT 3 audios are stored in WIM files. Nothing is known about this format at present. WIM are some kind of archives with special information about the audio. Anyways WIM is not playable, do not attempt to play these files with you codec pack!

Furthermore, On May23, 2011, Moddb.com released few DiRT 3 editing tools along with the EGO Audio Tool. The tool is responsible for giving you the access to the folder and WIM files. You will be able to play audio files and tweak to some extent such as replacing the original files, sorry you wont be able to extract though or convert to different formats.

Unpack and launch the utility, note that the utility will automatically find your installation path and present you with the screen similar to the screenshot shown below.

The track name and artist names are stored in ‘musicPlayer.xml‘ file under Audio Folder. Open this folder and search for the DiRT 3 music file name. In this case, mus_fnd_quad04 (File-name of ~/ mus_fnd_quad04.WIM ). Below screen-shot should reveal you the artist and track name.

There are about 49 tracks in DiRT 3. The following is the complete listing/RIP.

The ATI Radeon 7k series codenamed Southern Islands are expected to be based on something known as the VLIW4 (Very Long Instruction Word ) SP arrangement circuits. The same circuitry is used in the high end HD 6900 series. FYI the HD 6800 Series were based on VLIW5 arrangement. Theoretically both architectures provide similar computation power, VLIW4 providing reduced die size. Without jumping further, lets see whats this VLIW4 is?

VLIW4 Architecture

Click here to know more about this Architecture

VLIW4 is a chip architecture, you can say it is the GPU technology architecture. In VLIW4 where the number 4 (of VLIW4) means group of 4 SP’s (or 4 SIMD processor) which form a functional unit or AMD Radeon cores (Math units) of this new circuit architecture. All 4 SP’s have same computational potential. However, two of the SP’s especially every 3rd and 4th SP in the group has some special function which is currently unknown, but it may be used for scheduling other SP’s in the group. In 7k series, each SIMD will now be able to perform two GPE’s (Graphics Processing Engine) Cycle. This means almost 3-4x performance increase is expected as compared to the current generation one’s. VLIW designs are unique and are designed to execute many operations from the same task in parallel by breaking it up into smaller groupings called Wavefronts (In case you are wondering about NVIDIA, this is same as CUDA cores /WARP). In AMD’s case a wavefront is a group of 64 pixels/values (A warp on the other hand is 32-bit) and the list of instructions to be executed against them. Ideally, in a wavefront a group of 4 or 5 instructions will come down the pipe and be completely non-interdependent, allowing every Radeon core to be fed. [Read More at @nandtech]

While 7k series will be based on VLIW4, HD7900 will built on a different technology, a stepping stone for AMD’s GPU architecture called as GCN.

GCN (Graphics Core Next) Architecture

ATI brings in the Graphics Core Next (GCN) which is the architectural basis for AMD’s future GPUs, both for discrete products and for GPUs integrated with CPUs as part of AMD’s APU products. AMD will be introducing a major overhaul of its traditional GPU architecture for future generation products in order to meet the direction of the market and where they want to go with their GPUs in the future. The main focus is on the compute capability of the GPU’s targeting towards high performance computing for enterprise markets where precision is a key. The GCN is completely a non-VLIW4 architecture, means that the architecture will be focusing completely on the threads now instead of instructions. To be precise, the non-VLIW4 SIMD would run parallelism at thread level also known as the TLP (Thread Level Parallelism), the one which NVIDIA follows. The new 7k series with GCN architecture would be able to perform double precision floating point operations i.e FP64. There’s more to it.

Leaked Specification ATI Radeon HD 7k Series

RAMBUS XDR™2

For the first time, ATI GPU’s higher end 7k series 7970 and 7950 will harbor XDR™2 memories. The XDR™2 memory architecture is the world’s fastest memory system solution capable of providing more than twice the peak bandwidth per device when compared to a GDDR5-based system. Further, the XDR 2 (2005 by RAMBUS) memory architecture delivers this performance at 30% lower power than GDDR5 at equivalent bandwidth.

Click here to go to RAMBUS XDR™2 Page

XDR™2 will provide high-performance to gaming, graphics and multi-core compute applications. Each XDR 2 DRAM can deliver up to 80GB/s of peak bandwidth from a single, 4-byte-wide, 20Gbps XDR 2 DRAM device. With this capability, systems can achieve memory bandwidth of over 500GB/s on a single SoC. Watch to know more.

AMD launching the Southern islands in 2012 Q2 seems very exciting. AMD will be launching its 7k series with the 28nm GPU with VLIW4 and will later introduce the Graphics Core Next. With the advancement and more and more opting of DX11, 7k series would definitely accelerate the current tessellation performance and mostly the long awaited GPU Compute Capability.

Extensions, Character Controller and Vehicle source code made available in binary distribution.

Namespaces cleaned up.

Cleaned up a large number of warnings at C++ warning level 4, and set SDK to compile with warnings as errors.

No longer passing NULL pointers to user allocator to deallocate.

Added x86,x64 suffix to PxTaskCUDA.dll

Removed boolean return value from PxScene::addActor(…), and similar API calls.

Removed individual sample executables in favor of SampleAllInOne from PC and console builds.

Cloth

A new solution for simulating cloth and clothing.

TEGRA 2 ANDROID DEVELOPMENT PACK

Tegra 2

Tegra is NVIDIA’s family of system-on-a-chip (SoC) mobile processors designed to enable high resolution and engaging experiences on tablet, clamshell, mobile phone and other mobile computing platforms. As an SoC, Tegra comprises CPU, GPU and image, video & sound processors in a highly energy efficient package that runs a variety of operating systems including Android, Linux and Windows. For full system specifications of the NVIDIA Tegra 250 SoC, please click here.

Tegra Android Development Pack 1.0

The Tegra Android Development Pack installs all software tools required to develop for Android on NVIDIA’s Tegra platform and is the perfect companion for developing native applications for Tegra Developer Kits. This toolkit includes following: